About removing the Cross

From the web, about removing the Cross:


Summary of possible arguments: 12 Theses

The right to religious freedom can only mean its exercise - not the freedom from confrontation. The meaning of “freedom of religion” has nothing to do with creating a society that is “free from religion”!

Forcibly removing the symbol of the Cross is a violation on the same level as would to force atheists to mount this symbol. The blank white wall is also an ideological statement – especially, if over the previous centuries, it had not been empty. A "value-neutral" state is fiction, which is often used for propaganda purposes.

An alleged right not to be confronted with religious content, cannot be stronger than the right to free exercise of religion.

The states, which have signed the European Convention on Human Rights, have understood that the "right to freedom of religion" is certainly not a "freedom from religion".

Lawyers speak of the "slippery slope". Resist the beginnings! Today institutions are affected by iconoclastic attempts, tomorrow I will no longer be allowed to wear a religious chain around my neck.

Instead of fighting religious intolerance, religion, by way of its symbols, is being attacked.

One cannot fight political problems by fighting against religion.

Anti-religious fundamentalism makes itself an accomplice of religious fundamentalism when it provokes through intolerance.

Christianity by its very nature pushes outwardly - it can never be dismissed as private nor be locked into a ghetto!

The majority of the affected population would like to retain the cross! It is also a problem of democratic politics, giving priority to individual interests so blatantly.

The cross is the logo of Europe. It is a religious symbol, but still much more than that.

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The Cross is the Logo of Europe
by Martin Kugler

In 1960 Cardinal Konig of Vienna awoke from a coma after a serious car accident in former Yugoslavia; he looked at the wall of the hospital room and saw a picture of Tito. For the young archbishop this experience was the beginning of an internal process that led him to a special solidarity with the Christians in communist countries. For us the picture of this situation can help clear up a misunderstanding with which policies & politics are made today in Europe. It is the mistaken belief that real religious freedom is given if a society is free of religion, or - rather more diplomatically worded: Secularism is the proper way in which the state expresses its neutrality. This misconception, currently propagated by a judgment of the ECHR, is based on two false assumptions that, if held in a prejudice-free and reasonable discussion, could be easily disproved.

First, the talk of the value-neutral state: It is simply naive and the result of an illusion.
Secondly, the assumption that a public without any presence of religious life or religious symbols would be more "tolerant" or more appropriate to freedom of conscience than a "Public Square" which permits or even encourages statements of religious belief.
The first of the two conditions of our misunderstanding is rather a joke: value-neutral state? Against fraud and corruption? Against xenophobia and discrimination? Sins against the environment and sexual harassment in the workplace? A state that bans neo-Nazis, allows pornography, favors certain forms of developmental assistance , but others not. . . all due to neutral values?
Someone is trying to make a fool of us! Goethe already railed against talking about the nonsense of "liberal ideas". Ideas should possibly be good or right and our attitude towards people with other ideas should be liberal. As a historian, I can only interpret this talk of a value-neutral state thusly: It is a somewhat belated over-reaction of European intellectuals against the alliance of throne and altar of the past.

The second assumption one must take seriously, however: The great Jewish legal scholar, Joseph Weiler, said (given the debate about the reference to God in the European Constitution): As a member of a religious minority, he felt better off in a society that respects its religious symbols, than he would in a secular society, which would deny its roots and even work zealously against any expression of faith. One might add: The removal of the cross in a public hospital and the resulting blank walls are a sign which carry its own symbolism and send signals to dying patients, who look out for them.
Of course, the atheist parent might feel his or her child being molested by the cross in the classroom. But this is inevitable. I may also feel annoyed when upon entering a post office I catch sight of a photograph of the Austrian Federal President whom I have not voted for. Or if I am on the way to my daughter's nursery school looking at posters of the municipality of Vienna co-financed by me. Influence, ideological signals, visual presences - also sexist – will always exist everywhere. The only question is how and containing what. The state should intervene only very moderately. And if it does, not by bans that imprison religion into a ghetto. The cross is now less than ever a sign of restraint, but one of identity and cohesion of Europe. So not only Cardinal König was missing it in the Yugoslavian hospital room. Equally would I and also friends alienated from the Church miss it: On the mountain peaks of the Swiss Alps, on the rooftops of the Burgundian churches and the ambulances cars of the Red Cross. To the Christian, the cross is claim and mystery. But for Europe it is the most successful and best logo of all times. It should remain visible.
(Daily newspaper Die Presse, 6.11.09)


Dr. Martin Kugler studied history, political sciences and communication. He is director of Kairos consulting agency for non profit projects.

Persecution

The crime of these people? They were praying together.
From www.persecutionblog.com

Just to smile...

There must be a reason

Cult -> Culture. There must be a reason why two words have a common root...

The world is made...

The world is made of the substance of our senses, and it offers itself to us through the meanings that modulate perceptions.

David Le Breton, The taste of the world. An anthropology of the senses

Me and a mother

What to say to a mother who has recently started to deal with a chronic disease that threatens the life of an adolescent daughter? What to say if she is suspended between a possible terrible verdict and the hope that reappears, but is almost seen as a threat to paradox. If things go well, as it seems, it would be even more unbearable to be disillusioned later. 
Do I defend myself behind the white coat, which incidentally I do not wear, and do I treat her as a clinical case?  Do I frame her in an elegant diagnosis and give her something to relieve the intolerable anxiety that doesn't give her peace? 

But what to say, that has not already been said, and that doesn't sound affected or unnecessarily comforting, or misplaced. 
The words come later, I sense. Now,  I have to live her same anguish, and stay there, present, while the images of my children continue to turn around into my head. 
I have to let the pain bounce between me and her, and then try to face it together: with a presence at your side pain is just a little more bearable. I hope.

Maybe

Perhaps authentic relationship is the other name of charity ...

Frecce tricolori

The airshow of the Frecce Tricolori (the Italian Air Force acrobatic squadron) held on Sunday in Marina di Ragusa, during the Addio all'estate (goodbye to summer) day.

Hope

Hope encourages reason, and gives her the strenght to orientate will.

Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate.

Rosa

Your smile put everybody in a good mood, even if it counted only on a single tooth, and was surrounded by myriads of wrinkles. They were the eyes to give light to a face carved from years of endless mental hospital admissions. You did not talk for more than twenty years, not a word, never.

One morning, the meeting at the rehabilitation centre, you arrived hand in hand with Salvatore. You laughed and watched him. He was a lot younger than you, and besides his mental disorder, he also had a serious heart disease.

He looked at you too, shyly.

We all felt a thrill of tenderness and emotion through the air.

I'm not sure if my memory serves me correctly (many years have passed, and hundreds of faces and names), but I think that from that day, you started again to mutter something vague, sometimes.

Pasteurized milk

Calm sea, the water warm, the sun shining: it's time to swim. After a few strokes, I touch a piece of white plastic. I get angry. The usual idiots throwing things overboard. Then I look at it: there is something written in Arabic and English: Pasteurized milk.

Perhaps it was thrown overboard from a ship, but the doubt it was on board of any boat of immigrants seems plausible.

In any case, I think of what continues to happen a few dozen miles off, to children, women and men balancing on a boat, suspended on hundreds of meters of water.

How many of them are dead, how many bear the wounds of what they have seen and lived before, during and after the crossing. And how many more will die...

Yes, they are "illegal", and it is right that immigration is a "phenomenon to be regulated within the law".

But what a pity, for them and for us, to see our politicians taking advantage of the Italian's need for security by affecting poor people that come from theatres of war or from extremely poor countries; what a pity to hear the European Commissioners false statements that Europe is "doing everything possible"; what a pity to see an attorney forced by law to investigate five poor shipwrecked Eritreans, veterans of war and unimaginable horrors, for the crime of illegal immigration.

What a pity, at last, to see my people slowly sliding from the option for what is moral, to the option for what is legal.

I really think that the two options not always coincide...

Bebè Aido

A few months ago the Spanish minister Bibiana Aido said that a fetus of 12 weeks is a living being, but not a human being, having the second definition no scientific evidence.

It would be like saying that a fetus of 12 weeks can sometimes develop a man, sometimes a sheep. That perhaps would have a scientific basis, in minister Aido's mind.

A group of professionals (doctors, nurses, psychologists, experts in law) then developed an interesting initiative: the Bebè Aido.

The initiative consists of the exact reproduction of a fetus of twelve weeks that sucks his thumb, in order to make people see how human looks the "living, but not human being" .

What a scandal!

A very angry spokesman of the Spanish Socialist Party said that the initiative is a "serious insult to democracy."

In short, everything is permitted, in this Europe which burns more and more into a delirious fever probably never known before.

Only one thing is taboo, and therefore is considered a very serious and intolerable offense: seeing things as they are.

In other words, and tragically, insight into reality has become a taboo.

But insight into reality would mean to recover from insanity.

My sea

Behind the fence there are ruins of the archaeological park of Kaukana, vestiges of a settlement dating from the third century BC, then commercial port of some importance in Roman and Byzantine ages, until its destruction by the Saracens.

Adjacent to the lighthouse, there is the home of famous "Commissario Montalbano".

This is "my" sea, where I grew up, summer after summer.

Ready? Let's weigh anchor!

Am I good enough with my English to start this journey? Will I be able to say what I really want to say? How many errors will make my readers laugh?

I really don't know, but when something goes around into my mind and keeps going for weeks, I think there are two choices: obsessive compulsive disorder, or this is something you have to do.

I don't like the first choice, so...